Parallel Stories: A Novel

by Peter Nadas

  Though she barely touched it.

  She could open herself that wide. Then what was she talking about his being too big for her.

  And she didn’t let him go completely inside her, as if her intense heat, smoothness, and depth could not possibly be filled up.

  At this moment, they both seemed preoccupied more with themselves than with each other. They were sharply separated, maintaining only their contact points; they barely had anything to do with each other even though, in effect, their autonomy had dissolved completely, had ceased to exist. They consciously followed what was happening to them, but the person or persons involved in whatever was occurring seemed far ahead, with them following at a distance. As if they both had a hitherto unknown other self. Their wills also preceded them; only afterward would they say that that was exactly, precisely, how they wanted it. Now they both clearly understood that their own separate bodies were for the most part incapable of union, and something entirely different had, independently of them, already managed to unite.

  That is what they both now comprehended.

  Listen, this is painful, really, not pleasant at all, the man kept repeating; he would have gladly fled the sight before him, but for now could only paw and finger helplessly the light, hard, incredibly flexible and nimble body in his search for a handhold on something he considered familiar.

  Why not put it on my mouth instead, he moaned. I probably did wreck you, I’m sorry about that. Forgive me, he moaned desperately. Please, give it here, I’ll make it all better.

  But Gyöngyvér could not be stopped. As if she hadn’t understood what the other one wanted.

  Or perhaps she really did not hear him because her body, home of hearing and seeing, was already very far from her. After all, it was the first time that something she wanted had happened, she had initiated, or would have wanted from a man. Or she remained in the boarding-school shower room with her memories, and used Irénke’s sweet tongue and sharp little teeth to penetrate herself and the man. For years, if she wanted to, this little tongue could make her feel like a princess; her devoted servants never looked, because they never had to, for what she wanted, they always knew her wishes. This awareness made her open up, rise high above him, with her labia barely touching the swelling crown of his penis as she arched over and bent down from the heights toward the man’s darkly shining upper body.

  She gave back to the man what she had received from the girl.

  The man’s beauty filled her eyes, a kind of pleasing proportion her loins could find by themselves. She was brimming with burgeoning praise. She just reached him with her lips. She sucked and patted his strong nipples with her tongue. That’s how she extracted an advance on his cock. She bit down, pulled on him, twice, quickly, which made the defenseless man cry out again. And he would have thrust into her harder but she did not let him. Like a spring, she was bouncing above him, enjoying his obstinacy. She was conducting him with a triple-beat rhythm that radiated humor and jollity.

  This brave jollity, for which there was no substitute, she had also borrowed from Irénke.

  It certainly wasn’t usual for her, and never with a man. She barely allowed the stubborn head of his cock to touch her clitoris—the second beat; it could just slip inside her vagina—the third, closing cadence. She was filling herself up not with his physical bigness, but with a rhythm of sharply separable beats and chords.

  And then it started from the beginning, mercilessly, brutally; everything all over again. She became like a martinet who enjoys depriving a person in her charge of all means of resistance. Later it became clear why she hadn’t taken it into her mouth.

  Come on, let me have it, repeated the man impatiently, give it here, as if he were truly thirsty for it, though he knew he had no hope his wish would be granted. Please, I want to do it with my tongue, my mouth, I’ll heal it for you.

  He was also driven by a wish, a secret unavoidable thought like a visionary promise of relief, to take back some of his sperm from the woman. To suck and swallow some of it, while it was still possible, to scoop out the last drops with his tongue.

  But Gyöngyvér had no intention of obeying him. For some reason she was certain the man was merely trying to trick her. And she was enjoying the hitherto unknown circumstance. She had the upper hand.

  She wanted to hear him say he wanted her cunt. She wanted to force the word out of him.

  Tell me what you want so much, come on, spell it out.

  I won’t say it, moaned the man, I won’t.

  Then how would I know what you want to heal.

  Don’t tell me you don’t understand.

  I don’t care how, in Italian, German, any language, just please say it. And she added angrily, in a low voice, like a person taking her full revenge, if it’s all the same to you.

  Her sudden anger, which she underscored with a movement deviating from the guiding rhythm of her vagina, might have had to do with her lack of diligence in learning foreign languages; she’d begun to dabble in German and simultaneously studied Italian, but she bogged down around the tenth lesson. She didn’t even know what cunt was in Italian or German, though she could hardly expect to have a singer’s career without mastery of these languages.

  If I’m doing something you don’t like, let me up, replied the man, who didn’t understand what was going on and would have liked to shove her off. If it’s all the same to you, find somebody else, and right away too. Or let’s see what you can do on your own.

  A little while ago you wouldn’t let me talk. But this is what I wanted to tell you.

  I prefer watching it to listening to it.

  She did not respond. Unlike their aroused emotions and urge to quarrel, their loins remained indifferent. And it had never occurred to her to touch herself while a man was watching. Things like that were among her most closely guarded secrets, and she was about to share one with him. And she had never before talked, or been talked to, in the midst of lovemaking, about anything. Suddenly she was gripped by the unexpected realization that for hours, for days, or for who knows how long they’d been talking while making love without her truly noticing it. She didn’t understand herself or the situation; she had no idea who this other person was with whom everything became so distorted and transformed. It seemed impossible that everything could be so different. She thought it was positively repulsive.

  She rose along with him, as if fleeing, wanting at the same time to lean over him. And while she sucked his nipple again and cautiously bit its hardened tip, she very lightly drew her vagina across the head of his penis. She was being careful that the man should feel nothing of what was coursing through her own body, the many unsettling thoughts, the alternating hot and cold excitement in her back and thigh muscles. Still, she gave the man the impression that she was bidding farewell to him gently and discreetly. At the same time, he couldn’t possibly penetrate her more deeply or fiercely; alarmed, he realized there was nothing he could do. He wanted to catch up with her; she mustn’t go away. Now he wanted to cause pain. With his entire body, with his hips, with the huge raised and contracted muscles of his buttocks, he jerked, convulsed, and thrust himself into her several times in succession. Several decades of fear and anxiety would have been concentrated in these spasms if the pleasure of violence had not dissolved them. And the woman understood this, precisely: he found himself very close to the moment when standing on the sunny steps at the boarding school he had called after his father, begging him not to leave him there alone. Because she felt the importance of that moment, she did not allow the man’s violent thrusts to enter her. She sensed unerringly the peaks of his unassimilated torments, the heights he aspired to, his frustrated desires. And as if propelling herself up from the familiar depths of sunshine-illuminated water, with her taut body spanning the distance between the riverbed and the faraway surface, she found, among her own images, a simile for what she felt emanating from the man. With a ready-to-bounce straddle above him, she was protecting him, giving him a home,
and opening an umbrella over him, but when the man approached she moved away; if he wanted to withdraw she lowered herself on him a little, but never sat completely into him.

  Ágost grasped her waist with both his hands roughly to yank her back.

  I don’t want to force you, don’t make me, he hissed.

  If you’re not going to say it, don’t expect anything.

  You mean anything good.

  That’s right, nothing good.

  We can check who has more power over the other. Who’s stronger.

  That’s all we need.

  For a fraction of a second they looked at each other as enemies. In this look, the woman was stronger; no doubt about it. Which revealed many things both retroactively and in advance. And this sensation destroyed many illusions, bringing them crashing down from their heights, yet everything was made lighter by the prevailing state of swoonlike unconsciousness. Still they wrestled, as if fighting for their lives. Their bodies were pervaded by the trembling and pulsing of the earth’s bowels, which slowly began to shake the house, the air, the walls, windowpanes, bed, vibrating above their skin and throbbing painfully in their eardrums. They both unleashed their forces: their wounded pride, their loneliness, all the offenses suffered and everything that during four days had accumulated like waste in their muscles and strained their nerves; like dogs, they set on each other in their mutual admiration, but this had nothing to do with fighting.

  Devour it all, if you still can.

  Their beastliness opened up new liberating and unknown layers of pleasure. And a huge open throat was approaching them, gaping and belching, infernally rattling, coming from far away with an even, continuous clatter, a persistent hum.

  It will swallow them. Gyöngyvér knew the noise well, which Ágost could not have known.

  Still, in this situation she found herself unprepared. As if, with its terrifying teeth, it were crawling out of the deepest bottom of the night now covering the entire world. An infernal signal to which she had paid no heed until now. A heavenly signal. Their limbs and other parts were merging and submerging in one another. With their tongues, wide-open lips, teeth, and gums they were inching forward in each other and they not only searched but also found, yet couldn’t say just what.

  The major bombardments during the siege of Budapest fortunately spared the buildings of Újlipótváros, there were hardly any direct artillery hits in the area, though during the intense street fighting the building fronts with their balconies, loggias, and conservatories did suffer some damage.*

  Now, in the light of streetlamps, shaded by the foliage of large trees, the many small marks of the damage could not be seen.

  Mrs. Szemző enjoyed the familiar summer fragrances and could see the scene as if she were walking through it twenty-five years before. Friendly lights shone in the windows. At this hour, traffic was still busy here. Around open entrance gates youngsters were idling, couples were strolling hand in hand, or were just returning from Margit Island with their noisy children armed with scooters, rubber balls, and small tricycles. Gyöngyvér had erred somewhat, it was just past nine o’clock. The number 15 streetcar, which never had more than one car as far as anyone could remember, made its rounds between Váci Road and Lipót Boulevard, which later became Szent István Boulevard. It still made the same loud clatter on the tracks embedded in hard ceramic bricks, and the noise still reverberated between the unadorned, smooth walls of the surrounding buildings.

  However, this approaching deep rumble did not come from the passing streetcar.

  On the far side of the massive blocks of the Palatinus buildings, built in the teens of the century, somewhere from the direction of Margit Island a tugboat was approaching, and its dreadful noise spread across the water, shaking even the stone-lined riverbed, and filtered through the side streets and between the buildings. Anyone living in this quarter of the city had become used to the noises that came from, passed across, and slowly died away over the river.

  In the evening, in this section of the city, people went for walks either down to the river or to window-shop on Lipót Boulevard. Mrs. Szemző did not mind having missed the streetcar. She often crossed the bridge to Buda, went along the chestnut-tree-lined Margit dock, and made her way back on the Lánc Bridge. In the evenings, she usually took a leisurely walk to Szent István Park nearby, where one of her friends, like herself, had had a large apartment since the mid-1930s. She took the streetcar only if it rained. Back in those ancient days, their company would meet once a week in Mária Szapáry’s eighth-floor apartment; after the war they met more often and since the 1956 revolution almost every evening, except when they went to a concert or the opera, together or separately, but never fewer than four times a week. The concierge had warned them, bickering with them every early morning, that begging the countess’s pardon, but he wasn’t willing to go on with this gate-opening at the crack of dawn, and he would report to the housing authority that he wouldn’t go on with it. This was considered a rather serious threat, but they enjoyed the fact that no one could tell them what to do anymore, not even the concierge, or at least that his complaint would result in nothing because those days were over or perhaps soon would be over.

  Yet the countess did not forgive him his early-morning unpleasantnesses. Occasionally, and bluntly, she gave him a piece of her mind.

  Listen to me, Varga, she would say, thrusting a twenty-forint bill into the man’s hand. I’ve already told you, you have two choices. Either you politely open the gate for my guests, no grumbling, or you give me a key and I’ll open the gate myself.

  Which the concierge would not risk, and not necessarily for the reason he gave the countess.

  It was indeed strictly forbidden to let tenants have a key to the main entrance or the elevator.

  He could have ignored this prohibition, but he feared losing the extra twenty- and hundred-forint bills he managed to extort with his grumbles.

  Who needs a gin fizz, asked Mária Szapáry casually as she came in from the kitchen.

  She stopped under the too-bright ceiling lamp.

  I’ve got a lemon, for a change.

  The two women whom she was addressing were deep in conversation outside in the dark, by the railing of the enormous rooftop terrace.

  One of them, wearing a blue, abundantly shirred calico skirt, a rather rustic starched snow-white blouse with leg-of-mutton-sleeves, with a red coral necklace on her daring décolletage and a wide soft-leather belt at her waist, the ensemble giving her a strongly theatrical appearance, turned irritably and, with her eternal smile, replied.

  We don’t need anything, that’s for sure, Mária, but speaking for myself, I wouldn’t mind a gin fizz.

  Same here, called the other woman, who, despite her finely patterned, richly cascading dark silk dress, seemed a more modest and insignificant person.

  The gin fizz meant that they were again living the way one should live in peaceful conditions.

  They could afford all sorts of superfluous things.

  Their bare elbows touched lightly on the railing. Until now they had been talking not to each other but into the darkness, to themselves. They were both past sixty, but their postures retained their former elegance, in which there was not only diligently invested hard work—they exercised, hiked, swam at the Lukács Baths in the morning—but also some deception. They began their evening easily and always saw to their appearances, but the tension between them was noticeable. That peculiar antagonism or irritability that aging people provoke in one another. The strict rules of card-playing kept them from speaking much. They spared each other their daily worries and, to reveal as little as possible of these efforts, paid great attention to their attire and their enduring smiles. By the wee hours, however, they grew heavy, their makeup wore off, and in the heat of the card games their hair became mussed, which they didn’t even bother to fix. By then it would have been superfluous to talk about anything.

  They looked at the third woman, without having to be asham
ed of anything.

  The glass wall of their hostess’s big living room was kept wide open from spring to fall.

  Surrendering to the splendid view, every evening they would stroll out on the terrace for some fresh air and to exchange a few confidential words. Now, however, they paid no attention to the city, which with its glittering lamps and bridges barely registered on their absentmindedly contemplative countenances. Southward, one could see all the way to Gellért Mountain; to the north, though, past the island sunk in darkness, the bleak shadow of the Árpád Bridge was hovering above the river, shining metallically with the reflection of arc lights, and beyond that was nocturnal wilderness. The lowlands of Fót, where artillery fires had first flared in December 1944 and seemed so close that people hadn’t known whether to be hopeful or fearful. They were talking quietly into the space before them, cutting into each other’s monologue with unguarded words and sweet, almost dutiful smiles; their gaze roamed over the ridges of the Buda hills, resting occasionally on the range’s distant peaks blending softly into one another.

  There, in the west, where later the front moved on, something of the twilight red was still shining, making the mass of mountains glimmer in dark blue; their eyes were drawn to the meeting of light and darkness.